Introduction

As an Open Source Advocate, one of my desires has been to help educate the world about Open Source and its many advantages. Like so many other dreams, a great place to start planting seeds is with the young.

My inital goal was simply to form an organization to re-cycle older pc systems for the benefit of lower income families and non-profit, service organizations, such as Boys and Girls Clubs and the like.

Lots of older computers can do a great job of meeting the needs of many people when running Linux operating systems. Not everyone needs to be caught up in the MicroSoft trap of more hardware and more software.

As I shared ideas with some close friends I learned about the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation and decided to start sharing my own personal thoughts and ideas with others. Many concepts (including the organization name) have been copied after the HOSEF model. This was done intentionally as someday I would love to see an organization in each and every state in the union.

Ideally this initial blog post will lead to the establishment of a dialog with other like-minded individuals and eventually non-profit groups to provide low-cost computing. As a result, a large pool of individuals experienced in Open Source software and its advantages will develop right here in Tennessee.

A skilled talent pool such as this could be very beneficial in bringing high tech companies to the state along with awesome job opportunities and incredible boosts to the economy.

Today I learned how important knowledge about Open Source would be to everyone. Many schools are requiring students to purchase laptop computers that run WindowsXP! Even with "student discounts", Linux is a lower cost alternative operating system and is ideal for "student budgets".

Some schools also require MicroSoft Office even though OpenOffice.org provides all the functionality of MicroSoft Office for considerably less (FREE vs $???)!

Please add thoughts, ideas, and suggestions via comments to this blog.